Étiquette : open access policies

Open access (OA) is a global movement to make research results widely available by removing price and permission barriers. OA infrastructure is necessary for implementing open access and open science in any country.

The aim of the present paper is twofold: (i) to give a description of the Greek OA infrastructure with emphasis on academic repositories and OA journals, and (ii) to examined the OA availability of publications authored by Greek researchers and published in international journals.

Results indicated that Open access infrastructures in Greece have been steadily improving over the past years, with 28 out of 36 HEIs running their own IR and 116 OA journals being published.

The OA availability of the literature produced by Greek researchers is similar to that found in other studies and falls within the range that has been reported for European countries.

Although numbers seem rather satisfactory, there are a number of challenges that have to be addressed at both the infrastructural and the policy level, the most important being the implementation of national open policies and funders mandates.

Alongside these policy developments, there has been an increase in open science services that aim to provide global data on OA. These services often exist separately to locally managed institutional systems for recording OA engagement and policy compliance.

The aim of this study is to enhance Brunel University London’s local publication data using software which retrieves and processes information from the global open science services of Sherpa REF, CORE, and Unpaywall.

The study draws on two classification schemes; a ‘best location’ hierarchy, which enables us to measure publishing trends and whether open access dissemination has taken place, and a relational ‘all locations’ dataset to examine whether individual publications appear across multiple OA dissemination models.

Sherpa REF data is also used to indicate possible OA locations from serial policies. Our results find that there is an average of 4.767 permissible open access options available to the authors in our sample each time they publish and that Gold OA publications are replicated, on average, in 3 separate locations.

A total of 40% of OA works in the sample are available in both Gold and Green locations. The study considers whether this tendency for duplication is a result of localised manual workflows which are necessarily focused on institutional compliance to meet the Research Excellence Framework 2021 requirements, and suggests that greater interoperability between OA systems and services would facilitate a more efficient transformation to open scholarship.

Jisc Collections has had agreements with open access (OA) publishers since the mid-2000s. In 2014, following the UK government’s response to the Finch Report, it started to target hybrid OA via ‘offsetting agreements’ that covered both subscriptions and article processing charges for OA.

This article will provide a status update on OA negotiations in the UK in the context of the UK’s progress towards OA. It will look at some of the concerns about the progress of OA in the UK, how negotiations have evolved in response, and will look at prospects for their future direction.

Open Access has been supported at the University of Kent from an early stage with the establishment of the Kent Academic Repository in 2007.

Initially, this work was accommodated within the existing library staff structure, but the pace of change, funder requirements, and a new university plan meant that support for Open Access needed to become explicit.

Therefore, a research support team was established using a matrix working system. This article details this new structure and reflects on the benefits and challenges it brings.

There are many compelling reasons to make research open access (OA), but raising the awareness of faculty and administrators about OA is a struggle. Now that more and more funders are introducing OA policies, it is increasingly important that researchers understand OA and how to comply with these policies.

U.K. researchers and their institutions have operated within a complex OA policy environment for many years, and academic libraries have been at the forefront of providing services and outreach to support them. This article discusses the results of a qualitative study that investigated effective practices and strategies of OA outreach in the United Kingdom.

METHODS

Semistructured interviews were conducted with 14 individuals at seven universities in the United Kingdom in late 2015. Transcripts of these interviews were analyzed for dominant themes using an inductive method of coding.

RESULTS

Themes were collected under the major headings of “The Message”; “Key Contacts and Relationships”; “Qualities of the OA Practitioner”; and “Advocacy versus Compliance.”

DISCUSSION

Results indicate that messages about OA need to be clear, concise, and jargon free. They need to be delivered repeatedly and creatively adapted to specific audiences. Identifying and building relationships with influencers and informers is key to the uptake of the message, and OA practitioners must have deep expertise to be credible as the messengers.

CONCLUSION

This timely research has immediate relevance to North American libraries as they contend with pressures to ramp up their own OA outreach and support services to assist researchers in complying with new federal funding policies.

Introduction

Journal publishers increasingly offer governmental and charitable research funders the option to pay for open access with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, which allows sharing and adaptation of published materials for commercial as well as non-commercial use.

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association recommends this licence as the least restrictive Creative Commons licence available. We set out to investigate whether pharmaceutical companies are offered the same options.

Methods

Using Journal Selector (Sylogent, Newtown, PA, USA), we identified journals with a 2015 impact factor of at least 15 on 24 May 2017, and excluded journals that only publish review articles from the analysis.

Between 29 June 2017 and 26 July 2017, we collected information about the journals’ open access policies from their websites and/or by email contact. We contacted the journals by email again between 6 December 2017 and 2 January 2018 to confirm our findings.

Results

Thirty-seven non-review journals listed in the Journal Selector database, from 14 publishers, had a 2015 impact factor of at least 15. All 37 journals offered some form of access with varying embargo periods of up to 12 months.

Of these journals, 23 (62%) offered immediate open access with a CC BY licence under certain circumstances (e.g. to specific research funders). Of these 23, only one journal confirmed that it offered a CC BY licence to commercial funders/pharmaceutical companies.

Conclusion

The open access policies of most medical journals with high impact factors restrict the dissemination of medical research funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

To give the scientific community freedom to read, reuse and adapt medical publications, publishers and academic journal editors would ideally allow pharmaceutical companies to fund unrestricted and immediate open access with a CC BY licence.